Exploring real-time music composition through competitive gameplay interaction

Musical apps, interfaces, and installations have opened real-time music composition to non-experts through the use of game-like interactions. Few of these systems harness competitive game elements, reflecting an assumption that the aesthetic experience and mechanical demands of competitive gameplay are incongruous with musical creativity. Limited research or practice has explored this interplay, revealing a gap for new understandings of musical games and interactive composition. My research aims to address this gap through a body of original works – EvoMusic, Chase, and Idea – that explore the potential for competitive human-computer dialogues to support accessible, creatively stimulating composition experiences. Each work takes a divergent approach to competitive gameplay. In EvoMusic, players cannot win or lose, but contest the inexorable growth of an evolving musical population to curate and defend a desired sonic output. Chase introduces notions of danger and defeat, assigning musical outcomes to the player’s attempts to evade a pursuing hostile agent. Idea then adds elements of progression and victory; players manipulate musical motifs to navigate mazes, defeat enemies, and earn new creative resources. The games were evaluated in two mixed-methods comparative user studies to investigate how these divergent approaches influence the compositional experience. Players did not reflect the literature’s aesthetic opposition to the synthesis of composing and competing, but noted that sufficiently strong game incentives could overpower musical decision-making. The traditional game structures of Chase and Idea were viewed as more engaging overall, yet only EvoMusic engendered interaction that was at once creatively and competitively stimulating. These findings reveal a more complex interplay between accessible music-making and competitive gameplay than previously assumed, unearthing new challenges and potentials for interactive composition that I explore herein.